10 • JESUS CHRIST – THE TRUTH
true. The whole edifice of science and technology is based on things being either true or false and you won’t hear the phrase ‘post-truth’ being used in any laboratory. Truth exists. Yet if truth does exist it’s undeniable that today people do seem to hold lightly to it. The result is an extraordinary paradox. On the one hand we see widespread scepticism about what is claimed to be truth by any authority, whether scientific or religious. On the other there is an astounding credulity when it comes to mysteries, theories and conspiracies. We are in an age when an ‘alternative viewpoint’, even if unsupported by facts, seems to compel more support than ‘the traditional view’, even if it is defended by an entire library of facts. The Internet must take some of the blame. There was a time when to promote an idea it was necessary to persuade someone to take the costly risk of publishing it in a book; a process that normally involved the checking of facts. Today anybody can publish anything and anybody does. The Internet has democratised knowledge in the worst possible way: now you don’t need to know anything to be an expert! Truth matters, and certainly so in the case of Jesus. The Bible claims that he is someone who controls our eternal destiny and demands our allegiance. How we live – and certainly how we die – hinges on the truthfulness of that claim. Yet if modern culture is wrong to downplay truth it does have reasons for doing so. One source of the disfavour towards truth is a widespread certainty that there is more to the universe than can be described by cold scientific facts. ‘There must be more than this!’ was a powerful advertising catchphrase for the Alpha Course that echoed a near universal sentiment in twenty-first-century minds. The reality is that faith of all sorts, whether as religion, spirituality or simply superstition, is everywhere and seems to be becoming more widespread. There is a reason for this: human beings have hungry hearts and all the tricks and trinkets offered by the modern world leave us unsatisfied and malnourished. The result is that progress has produced a mind-set that is more open to the possibility of the supernatural – and hence the Bible’s view of the way the world works – than many people expected.
Jesus Christ The Truth 234x152 256 Pages.indd 10
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